Creativity Quote by Nikki Sixx

It is, on the surface, a goofy bit of rock-talk: comparing Iggy Pop to a cat. Underneath, Nikki Sixx is sketching a whole ethic of survival that’s basically the opposite of nostalgia. Cats don’t retire; they stalk. They don’t become “legacy acts”; they keep testing the room. By putting Iggy in that animal category, Sixx isn’t praising technique or even genius so much as an appetite - the restless drive that keeps an artist sharp long after the mythology calcifies.

“Hunger” does a lot of work here. In rock culture, it’s shorthand for the thing that can’t be faked: the need that makes someone dangerous onstage and unsatisfied off it. It also implies deprivation and volatility, the sense that the performer is powered by lack - of comfort, of approval, of completion. That’s a subtle compliment from Sixx, whose own story (addiction, reinvention, endurance) treats ambition less like a career strategy and more like a metabolism.

Name-checking Iggy Pop matters because Iggy is practically a case study in staying feral: punk’s elder statesman who refuses the dignified museum pose. Sixx’s line quietly draws a boundary between artists who polish their brand and artists who keep risking embarrassment. The cat metaphor flatters with a sting: independent, half-tamed, impossible to fully own. In a business that constantly asks legends to become products, “always have that hunger” is a defense of the messy impulse that made them legends in the first place.